Land Artist Justin Piers Bateman
Stone & Pebble Portraits by Justin Bateman: Webpage // Instagram // Facebook
How do you see your role as an artist today?
Justin Bateman: To encourage everyone and anyone to enjoy creativity. It’s not about being good at drawing, it’s about cultivating imagination. Skills can be acquired, but imagination is the birth of all endeavour.
How would you describe your working method?
Justin Bateman: Intervention art, I guess. Small/ micro adjustments can lead to big shifts over long periods of time.
How can artists be paid for their work and at the same time
maintain a critical attitude towards the commercial art market and public funding partners?
Justin Bateman: That’s a tricky one! I find it hard to monetise my work. To date I have kept my creativity and capitalist tendencies quite seperate. I enjoy working beyond the confines of institutional powers.
George Washingstone
Justin Bateman: I did have to wash the stones – as I collected from a railway.
‘Paper money has had the effect that it will ever have, to ruin commerce, oppress the honest, and open the door to every species of fraud and injustice.’ – George Washington
‘Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.’ –Henry David Thoreau
‘Grace’ (Lady from Myanmar)
‘Peace isn’t an experience free of challenges, free of rough and smooth, it’s an experience that’s expansive enough to include all that arises without feeling threatened.’ – Pema Chödrö
Justin Bateman: My work is not political, but the context is inherent in every portraits physiognomy. ‘Grace’ is based on a photograph by Oleg Doroshenko, ‘Myanmar old lady’.
‘Fisherman’
‘The charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of what is elusive but attainable, a perpetual series of occasions for hope’. – John Buchan
‘Refugee 1’
Justin Bateman: Inspired by a photograph of Burmese Refugees in Thailand, with the kind permission of Christian Bobst.
‘Refugee 2’
Justin Bateman: Help Myanmar end the violence and restore democracy by donating to the interim government CRPH.
